More honest.
Sometimes I still thought about the first divorce papers and how easily a forged signature had turned love into suspicion.
Sometimes Sylvie still woke from dreams in which someone entered the hospital and took the babies away.
But Victor had been wrong about one thing.
He thought the truth would destroy us because it was ugly enough to make us turn on each other.
For a while, it almost did.
Instead, the truth destroyed the lies around us.
My father had left behind secrets I never wanted.
Victor had turned those secrets into a weapon.
Crane had sold loyalty for access.
A clinic had failed at the one responsibility families trusted it to protect.
We could not undo any of that.
We could decide what came afterward.
That evening, when I arrived home, Julian crawled toward me before I had removed my coat.
Elise followed, slower but determined.
Sylvie watched from the kitchen doorway.
“Your brother and sister missed you,” she said, smiling.
I picked both children up.
“That’s not what they call me.”
As if on cue, Julian pressed a hand against my face and made the sound he had recently learned.
“Da.”
Sylvie’s smile disappeared into tears.
Mine nearly did too.
Biology had given us one answer.
Love had given us another.
And after everything that had been forged, stolen, switched, and manipulated, that was the first truth no one else got to write for us.
